Publications
Experimental media archaeology should be disseminated hands-on and, for this reason, I have recently been favouring workshops and presentations over academic journal articles. However, here are a few of my publications on media art history:
- Bantjes, Rod. 2014. "“Vertical Perspective Does Not Exist:" The Scandal of Converging Verticals and the Final Crisis of Perspectiva Artificialis." Journal of the History of Ideas 75(2):305-36.
- Abstract – In this paper I document the astonishing suppression in western visual culture of an effect that we see daily when we look up or down at buildings – the verticals appear to converge. Nineteenth-century debates reveal not only that people mistakenly believed that this effect violated the rules of perspective, but that many convinced themselves that they did not see it when they tilted their heads. My purpose is to explain how these confusions persisted through to the end of the nineteenth century and why the prohibition against representing converging verticals was relinquished in painting only after perspectiva artificialis was abandoned. I argue that perspectiva artificialis was fused to an architectural model of space and its truth was covertly guaranteed by a mathematical model of vision – static and without physiology. These conceptions were exposed and undermined by the dynamism of modernity and technologies of embodied vision such as the stereoscope.
- Bantjes, Rod. 2014. "Hybrid Projection, Machinic Exhibition and the Eighteenth-Century Critique of Vision." Art History 37(5):912-39.
- Abstract – In this paper I document a form of spatial projection in western art that is a hybrid between Albertian perspective and curvilinear perspective. In the seventeenth century artists experimented with hybrid projection and, in the eighteenth, with apparatuses for exhibiting the visual such as the zograscope and peepshow, in an effort to model how theorists like Berkeley were beginning to understand the incorporation of binocularity, motion and memory in human spatial perception. Machinic forms of exhibition and physiological theories of perception challenged perspective theory, and the status of painting supported by it, earlier than is often supposed. The elevation of painting to ‘high art’ was a response to the ‘mechanick’ taint of technologically-mediated forms of exhibition. That elevation occasioned strategic denial of the embodied character of vision and of interesting machinic qualities of all visual exhibition.
- Bantjes, Rod. 2015. “Reading Stereoviews: The Aesthetics of Monstrous Space.” History of Photography 39(1):33-55.
- Abstract – In this paper I argue that the diverse archive of stereoscopic imagery has not so far been properly read historically, that is, in relation to its material and discursive context. The early nineteenth-century context was characterized by multiple positions in debate which can be used to make sense of three broad projects of stereoscopic representation. The first, naïve realist project was to subsume stereoscopy under geometric optics and to claim for it verisimilitude to the thing represented and in the process leave unchallenged the conventions of perspective painting as a model of how we actually see. The second was to embrace the stereoscope’s contribution to a long-standing critique of the anomalies of binocular ‘natural vision’ and to explore a new pictorial logic of geometrically-impossible objects in geometrically-monstrous space – an aesthetic that I begin here to document. This was not so much a project of ‘realism’ as of verisimilitude to a radically transformed conception of natural vision – one that had already begun and would continue to undermine the ‘truth’ of perspective convention. The third was anti-realist, inspired by evidence that spatial perception was not determined by external stimulus but rather constructed through the intervention of a sometimes capricious spatial imagination.
- Bantjes, Rod. 2016. “Hacking Stereoscopic Vision: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Critical Inquiry in Stereoscope Use.” International Journal of Film and Media Arts 1(2):4-21.
- Abstract – While recent scholarship has emphasised narratives of immersive realism that surrounded the parlour stereoscope, my aim in this paper is to understand better the countercurrents of nineteenth-century stereoscopic culture – the artefacts, practices and discourses that powerfully undermined realist assumptions about spatial perception and the “truth” of stereoscopic representation. Wheatstone’s original stereoscopes were designed to “hack” spatial perception and subject each of its component principles to artificial manipulation. What Wheatstone uncovered were glaring anomalies for prevailing theories of veridical sight which had relied upon the principle of binocular convergence (understood as a precise trigonometric measure of depth). Following a popular tradition of critical inquiry known as “rational recreation,” amateurs too used their stereoscopes to reflect on the perplexities of binocular spatial perception. Analytic line drawings highlighted the inexplicable binocular suture of strikingly disparate images. Stereograms with their images transposed revealed the capacity of the mind to constitute volumetric objects irrespective of binocular cues. Hyperstereo images (taken from a wide separation and therefore at an increased angle of binocular convergence) sparked debate and perceptual uncertainty as to whether the 3D effects of these or indeed all stereograms were distorted – elongated along the z axis and/or miniaturized. Realists, including some astronomers hoping to use hyperstereo photographs as visual evidence of the shape of the moon’s surface, sought unsuccessfully to solve the problem of elongation by ensuring that the angles at which stereo photographs were taken were reproduced in the angles at which the eyes viewed them in the stereoscope. Astronomers were forced to quietly abandon the stereoscope as a reliable witness of spatial form. Others, artists in particular, reveled in the anti-realist implications of a spatial imagination that constructs the perceptual world in sometimes capricious fashion.
- Bantjes, Rod. 2017. “‘Perspectives Bâtardes’: Stereoscopy, Cézanne, and the Metapictoral Logic of Spatial Construction.” History of Photography 41(3):262-85.
- Abstract – Stereoscopy initiated a dimensional shift that freed representation from the laws of geometric optics and long-standing conventions of linear perspective, creating aesthetic possibilities that were first explored by now-obscure stereo-photographers. The late nineteenth-century ‘rupture in the pictorial order’ that Hubert Damisch attributes to Cézanne, has a genealogy that includes stereoscopy, the debates about binocular space perception that it occasioned as well as innovative photographic work for the stereoscope. Through reading Hippolyte Taine, Cézanne was aware of the Berkelean idea that binocular space is not seen, but rather assembled from visual and tactile sensation sampled across time. The problem that this understanding posed for representation led many to insist that binocular space could only be invoked through synthetic apparatuses like the stereoscope; others argued for new conventions of planar representation, or ‘binocular painting’. The visual evidence from Cézanne’s work suggests that he paid attention to prescriptions for binocular painting and also to the new pictorial language developed by stereo-photographers. Stereo-photographers in the 1850s and 1860s, by abandoning perspectival conventions and proposing a constructivist conception of space, helped to transform Western visual culture in hitherto unappreciated ways.
- Bantjes, Rod. 2019. “Pre-Cinema, Pre-Giff, or Auto-Erotic Machine Art?”. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts (Artech 2019) October(32):1-8.
- Abstract – In this paper I discuss the meaning of a ubiquitous digital art form, the animated GIFF, in the context of a technological/social history that stretches back to repetitive-loop animation devices of the mid-nineteenth century. Most histories treat these devices as ‘pre-cinema’, and as precursors of total realism. I am sympathetic to more recent histories that treat them as pre-GIFF. I raise the methodological problem of how we choose between these conflicting approaches. Our ideal should be historicist: we should refer our interpretation to contexts that were available to nineteenth-century actors. However, when relevant contexts are diverse and competing, as they were in this case, we are condemned to a degree of ‘presentism’ in how we select among them. Choosing to view the nineteenth-century devices through the lens of the GIFF brings into focus a critical, reflexive and playful approach to illusion known as rational recreation. This nineteenth-century context reveals a number of levels of self-reflexivity in this machine art. It was liberated from mimetic representation and generated an extraordinary freedom of the imagination alongside a dark auto-erotic pessimism. All of these elements can plausibly be claimed for the genealogy of the GIFF.
- Bantjes, Rod. 2021. “The Optical Machine’s Asynchronic Progress.” Technology and Culture 62(4):1119-42.
- Abstract – In this article I address the unsolved problem of how the eighteenth-century optical machine generated an illusion of spatial depth and why variations of the apparatus continued to be produced well into the twentieth century when it should have been superseded by technically superior devices such as the stereoscope. I trace, across this diverse constellation of artefacts, design themes and variations that I take as evidence of embedded artisanal knowledge. Optical machine design was inconsistent with eighteenth-century optics, as exemplified by the camera obscura and linear perspective. It reflected an emergent paradigm according to which the forms of the external world are projected by the mind upon incomplete sense data—a process of world-production that philosophers were attempting to explain using metaphors of optical devices like the concave mirror and theater stage. My emphasis on asynchronous progress is a corrective to Jonathan Crary’s Foucauldian model of homogenous, successive “scopic regimes.”
- Bantjes, Rod. 2021. “The Birth of Machine Sex: The Pornographic Phenakistiscope Disks of the 1840s.” Proceedings of Artech 2021: 10th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Art October (10):1-8.
- Abstract – The phenakisitscope was the first device to invoke phantom machine motion in repetitive-loop
animations. Almost as soon as it was invented, Alfonse Giroux produced for the phenakisitscope a set of pornographic animations of delirious inventiveness. As though an early 19th-century Donna Haraway, he imagines transgressions of the boundaries between human and animal, human and machine, male and female (a continuous-loop gender reassignment) as well as between pleasure and pain. I explore the origins and implications of this inventiveness, so much in advance of the mid-19th-century crystallization of categories of sexual transgression. Giroux’s celebration of female desire and volition suggests an inspiration from Fourier’s mechanics of passional attraction rather than de Sade.
More intriguing is the inspiration from the machinic medium itself. The phenaskistiscope was understood as a machine that represented non-mimetically in a way that seems to have released the imagination. Many of the early images for it were pure machinic abstractions. Giroux’s images were largely masturbatory. Pistons relentlessly thrusting, gears endlessly meshing in pointless circular motion seemed to invoke an auto-erotic machine self-referentiality. The first human actions to be represented were those of labouring bodies already reduced to their machine-like components and semi-automated. Women performed repetitive tasks of domestic labour, including spanking, unendingly. The eroticism of machine discipline and power also animates Giroux’s imagination.
The construction of phenakistiscope motion involves analysis and reassembly. It allows for the virtual simplification and rationalization of work and working bodies as well as sex and sexual embodiments. These affordances allowed for the release of an inventiveness concerning the possibilities of human desire and the plasticity of the desiring body. Giroux creates for it perhaps the first techno-dream of endless erotic abundance and the escape of the limitations of one’s sexual embodiment.
- Bantjes, Rod. 2022. “Media Archaeology Experiences: Method, Meaning and Amusement.” International Journal of Film and Media Arts 6(1):20-41.
- Abstract – In this paper I make four interventions in favour of the seductive value of experiential media archaeology. 1) The constellation of material artefacts that mediate between us and the world are an implicit context for historic writing on perception, representation and epistemology. Engagement with the materiality of these often-forgotten artefacts offers insight into the meanings of texts that exclusively text-based scholarship would otherwise miss. 2) Tacit, artisanal knowledge embedded in artefacts sometimes exceeds that which can be found in written texts. I argue that an effective way of accessing this material logic is to re-build old artefacts to see how they work. Applying the theory of extended cognition to this process, I make a case for its unique epistemological value. 3) I show how the seductive intimacy of these objects can be amplified by re-imagining their aesthetic possibilities. 4) I discuss the educational value of the “rational recreation” with media artifacts as “philosophical toys.”
- Bantjes, Rod and Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszak. 2023. “The Object Chargé as a Layered Embodiment of the Social: The Case of a Barabás Stereoview.” Objects Chargé Symposium. April 20-21, 2023, University of Antwerp, Ghent.
- Abstract – Our objet chargé is a singular auratic object – a storied ritual goblet – coupled with mechanically reproduced images of it and an optical apparatus for re-invoking it as a tactile stereoscopic “reality.” We tie together threads from Benjamin’s theory of the “aura,” Bourdieu’s theory of the role of photography in making the social, and Durkheim’s theory of the social origins of sacrifice and the power of the sacred, to make sense of the power of the objet chargé. It becomes the vessel for the emotionally-charged idea of an abstraction – a society or nation. In our case study the goblet – associated with national heroes and toasts of victory and solidarity – becomes an emblem of the independent, democratic Hungarian nation that many had sacrificed their lives for in the failed revolution of 1848.
The effects of the objet chargé depend upon staged performances that are multiple and dispersed. The stereo photograph is of a scene staged in the studio of Miklós Barabás in which a “hunter” [nationalist revolutionary] grasps the goblet as if challenging the viewer to join him in a toast. The scene is re-staged virtually each time a Hungarian with nationalist sympathies activates their own stereoscopic copy of it. Here face-to-face solidarity is performed imaginatively, through technological mediation, in the way that both Durkheim and Benedict Anderson understand that it must be in large distanciated abstractions like modern nations. In performing the goblet, the act of solidarity, and the invocation of sacrifice to the national cause, the individuals constitute the object of representation, the national collectivity, as well as themselves as subjects of its overawing force.
- Bantjes, Rod. 2024. “Keystone’s Meta-Pictorial Stereoviews: Covert Transgressions within a Disciplinary Regime.” Early Popular Visual Culture 22(4): 399-423.
- Abstract – In this paper I argue that the ‘eye-training’ stereoviews of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are full of playful transgressions against the medical regime of ocular discipline in which they were embedded. These views were intended for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes within a project to medicalize and normalize spatial seeing. Read within that framing, they exemplify the influential claims of Jonathan Crary about stereoscopy’s role in the standardization and mechanization of vision, rendering it rational and efficient within an increasingly global system of industrial mass production. But evident within the design of these views is a more complex story. Many of them, visually and conceptually, are direct descendants of early nineteenth-century stereoviews used in rational recreation. These were intended to stimulate critical thinking about how perception and optical deceptions worked and return agency and social power to the observer. Others embody some of the tropes of modernist art of the early twentieth century – mixed-media collage, spatial fragmentation and re-composition, plus a reflexive, ‘meta-pictorial’ logic. Rather than a dull notion of conformity to a standardized spatial regime, these views invite the idea that space is a somewhat arbitrary construction, open to the often witty and creative agency of artist and viewer. They offer a kind of effectivity within modernity that is best understood in class terms.